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What do you do if you’re stuck with two elephants on a Siberian highway, your elephant-transporting truck is burning, and the pachyderms are freezing in -40 degrees weather {-40 degrees Fahrenheit… the only place where the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales coincide: editor}? The correct answer is that you make them jog and give them vodka. A local official said that the problems started when the two Indian elephants, owed by a travelling Polish circus, were enroute from Novokuznetsk to Omsk in Novosibirsk Oblast late Thursday. The hay in the truck caught fire from the diesel generator heating the cargo section, where the elephants were. The truck had to be stopped and the elephants promptly released. They escaped the fire unharmed, but were left stranded on a Siberian highway in winter.
The handler made the animals jog so that they didn’t freeze. Meanwhile, the local authorities were alerted, and the animals moved into a heated garage nearby. As an added precaution, the elephants were served two cases of vodka mixed with warm water. The official told RIA-Novosti, “They roared like it was the jungle… they must’ve been happy”. A spokeswoman for the Omsk city circus said that the animals only suffered minor frostbite to their legs and tips of their ears, nothing that’d disrupt their performance schedule. Their handler was admitted to hospital, also with frostbite.
14 December 2012
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20121214/178159421.html
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